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Sales of Unused IPv4 Addresses Gaining Steam
netbuzz writes "A growing number of U.S. carriers and enterprises are hedging their bets on IPv6 by purchasing blocks of unused IPv4 addresses through official channels or behind-the-scenes deals. There is certainly no shortage of stock, as these address brokers have blocks available that range from 65,000 to more than a million IPv4 addresses. And it's not just large companies and institutions benefiting, as one attorney who's involved in the market says he represents a woman who came into possession of a block of IPv4 address in the early '90s and now, 'She's in her 70s, and she's going to have a windfall.''"
Like drilling for oil, more efficient extraction techniques can efficiently harvest the (many) remaining IPv4 blocks. And let's face it: IPv6 is not favored by the man on the Clapham omnibus. He understands the clean format of IPv4, but IPv6 is just annoying! What's the deal anyway with 2^64 devices on your personal network? This is way over-specified. Some practical geeks need to come up with a clean extension to IPv4 (48 bits should be plenty) that uses the current dot formatting.
You cannot own an address, you lease it.
From who? Come on boys and girls, the person you lease something from is called an... umm... what's that word? Help me out?
If it's a lease, why can't you sublease the remaining months on your lease of an address range?
Sure, windfall now, but next month when IPv6 day comes and all the IPv6 sites stay lit, they'll be worth a rapidly diminishing amount.
ArsTechnica has a nice piece about IPv6 and why it's not going to be such a disaster thing after all, add to that the IPv6-capable home routers that are actually being made (at last!) and the ISPs who are rolling out IPv6 networking to their customers... and it's all looking rosy.
What utter and serious bullshit.
What else do you propose?
IPv4 address for regular allocation* have run out at the IANA and APNIC and will soon run out at RIPE and ARIN too.
Meanwhile IPv6 is still in it's infancy with the majority of end users not having access to the IPv6 internet. So if you want to run a public server it needs to have a v4 address.
Under these circumstances a market means that IPv4 address gradually rise in value and as that happens people will re-evalute what applications really need a public V4 address. Lack of a market means that addresses stay where they are even if they could be more lucrative elsewhere stifiling choice.
You cannot own an address, you lease it.
That is true for modern allocations, with older allocations the status is less clear.
But even for modern allocations the RIRs are coming round to the realisation that allowing some form of sales** is a good idea as part of managing the twilight years of IPv4. The alternative is that you will only be able to buy usable hosting services from providers who happen to have a pool of addresses already (most likely hosting providers who are also end-luser ISPs and so have addresses they can recover using ISP level NAT).
* There are still a few held back for special allocations.
** IIRC arin and ripe are requiring the recipiants of such sales to justify their address use to reduce hoarding.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
How, in any tangible way is she anything more than a cybersquatter? Also: 'came into possession'? What, they 'fell off the back of a truck'? Sounds as sketchy as the legal profession.
Several oil rigs would have gone into shutdown had there not been an update to the timestamping of data before the change-over.
That nothing happens is not a case of 'there was no problem' it is a case of 'almost all shit got fixed'.